


The Square Root of Negative One

by lettered



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 09:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettered/pseuds/lettered
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock watches a kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Square Root of Negative One

The damp made the pavement glint blue; bright false orange shone upon it. The mixture of the two made a metallic, oil-like sheen, amidst which Sherlock stood, and reviewed several truths he knew to be inarguable.

The first was that John was as straight as the streetlamp. The dilation of his pupils in response to particular subjects was the most conclusive evidence, though any countless number of things made it quite obvious. It was in the way he bought condoms and walked right past the other things; it was in his blog. It smeared all over Facebook--a juvenile form of evidence, but at least it was not because John had checked the “women” box under “Interested in:”. Anyone could do that; in terms of a person’s sexuality it meant very little, but there was John’s grade school friend, obviously quite gay. John’s grade school friend admired him very much; John was very aware of his grade school friend’s sexuality and never aware of his grade school friend’s interest in the way of fucking John’s brains out, not that the friend was extremely obvious about it, but Sherlock could tell.

He could tell that John was rarely aware of these things and that that was not a lie, not practiced obliviousness, just John.

Sarah was just the sort of woman John would be interested in, too, inarguable truth the second. Sherlock would have known what kind of woman John wanted merely from the books John read, the movies he liked, the programs he watched. There was not a common thread in these things, nor was there a female archetype that shone forth as a beacon to John’s sexuality, but people like certain things for certain reasons. Even when they did not know the reasons, everything still meant something, and Sherlock could make it all add up without any kind of integers.

The third truth was that Sarah was extremely interested in having sex with John that night, as she and John exited the taxi outside her flat, as Sherlock stepped out of the beam of that streetlamp across the street, as they came up to her door. She was interested in having the kind of sex with John that would not be the last time, the kind of sex that led to a long relationship, years and years of phone calls and of fighting and of wearing his jumpers, of tea and linguini and John looking at her legs, of anniversaries and hair in the drain and the night she will call him drunk; she will almost leave him, and he will propose, propose screaming brats and funeral plots and lives.

Sherlock could tell this for a thousand different reasons as well, but most of all her lip-stick. That was not the lip-stick of desperation, nor was it a shade for the office on a woman who knew what she was doing, which Sarah did and Molly didn’t (the eye-liner gave it away every time). It was the sort of lip-stick which made Sarah attractive and kissable, but subtly, so that no one but the people who actually very much wanted to kiss her noticed—the people who very much wanted to kiss her, and Sherlock.

John very much wanted to kiss her.

They did so on the stoop, how pedestrian, how sordid, how utterly cliché; some people deserved better kisses than kisses happening when the pavement was this colour, when the wall with the door above the stoop was grimy, and a dog had pissed on the streetlamp in whose shadow Sherlock stood. Things had happened on these pavement; men had spit and cats had shit and someone once had fallen off a bike; someone had squealed on the brakes and someone else had kicked a football; ants had laid eggs. Some people deserved better than kisses in moonlight where other ants and footballs and other people all had been; some people deserved better.

John didn’t think so.

John had never been able to grasp the obvious.

John held her face as he kissed her; he held it as though that face were something infinitely dear; his thumb stroked across her cheek forward and back, forward and back. His lips moved hungrily, for all his other gentleness; they moved like they could have her, and he could. John’s eyes were closed. He loved her.

There was nothing for Sherlock in that kiss. There was nothing to deduce; it was all so painfully apparent, writ boldly, like a grave or like an infant, like more than six billion people Sherlock was often trying to forget. There wasn’t any hint in John of Sherlock, some mark Sherlock had made, some reluctance Sherlock had elicited, some second thought or hidden longing. There was nothing in that kiss of Sherlock under the streetlamp, of Sherlock’s heart, beating so hard it should have bruised the ribcage, if such things were possible, of the way he couldn’t seem to breathe right—straight up through the nose; that was the way these things were done, Sherlock; any living human brute could do it, and animals too; ants did it through their bodies because what they needed was in the air, the air, the oxygen was right here, right here, couldn’t seem to get it; there was nothing of John taking away Sherlock’s oxygen with his mouth and breathing it back into him, breathing life back into him, making everything okay.

There was nothing of the way John and Sherlock would have kissed.

I could make him, Sherlock decided. If I wanted to.

He breathed.

John was straight as a poker, and Sherlock could still bend him. He knew what John wanted and it almost always equaled the female sex, but Sherlock worked well with imaginary numbers; what people wanted often equaled some value which in a general sort of way was equivalent to male or female, or both; the difficult part was how the values were not variables, for some people. Still, what people—most people, so Sherlock thought anyway—wanted was the value, and you could get that value in the other sex, though it might be unexpected.

Sherlock was adept at disguise; he could be exactly what someone wanted if he wanted something badly enough; he could be a drug dealer or policeman or a mourning friend; he could be priests and hackers and so like a woman, if someone wanted, everything one wanted from a woman, if that was what was required to get what he wanted; he could be friendly even to Anderson, if that was what was required.

The best of it—or worst of it, Sherlock standing under the streetlamp could not decide—was that he didn’t need a disguise. He could still bend John.

He could break John, if he wanted, break him right in half like a matchstick, burning bright at one end because Sherlock was that brilliant. He could do it because he was brilliant, and because Sherlock knew John right through to his marrow, and because Sherlock wanted it.

To do it right, it could take months, or years. It could take the undetectable destruction of all John’s other relationships, with a patience and a cunning and a manipulation already half in motion that made Sherlock yearn, thinking of the brilliance of it. It could take slow and subtle feeding of John’s adrenaline addiction, instead of the slow weaning away from it upon which people such as Sarah insisted. It could take putting John in constant danger, high speed chases, abductions, poisons, gun shots from a soldier’s distance, not knowing what to do, and it could take a thousand little touches, sudden smiles, winks, a murmured, “and then there’s you”. It could take a night over mussel shells with John not knowing every word he whispered was one that Sherlock taught him to say, a night of violin strings, thumbs on buttons, a night of old scars and of knees.

And then Sherlock could make John kiss him that way. All he would have to do was tell him to.

But it would not be this kiss, Sherlock realized, John kissing Sarah on the stoop, and that was what took away the air. There could be a thousand kisses, kisses just so, John holding him just so, Sherlock’s tongue down John’s throat just so; there could be countless kisses, and they still would not be this one. Sherlock could never have this one, not this one with its unique moment in time, with those particular skin cells on John’s lips, with those particular lashes on John’s lids, with that particular love in John’s heart, just so. There could never be this kiss again, with Sherlock under the streetlamp, standing in the shadows where he hadn’t broken John.

Yet.


End file.
